Newer Blood Thinner Brilinta Exceeds Plavix For Cardiac Bypass Surgery Patients

Newer Blood Thinner Brilinta Exceeds Plavix For Cardiac Bypass Surgery Patients.
In a trying out comparing two anti-clotting drugs, patients given Brilinta before cardiac detour surgery were less tenable to die than those given Plavix, researchers found. Both drugs ban platelets from clumping and forming clots, but Plavix, the more popular drug, has been linked to potentially threatening side effects in cancer patients.

In addition, some people don't metabolize it well, making it less effective. "We did meditate about a 50 percent reduction in mortality in these patients, who took Brilinta, but without any multiplication in bleeding complications," Dr Claes Held, an associate professor of cardiology at the Uppsala Clinical Research Center at Uppsala University in Sweden and the study's hero researcher, said during an afternoon host conference Tuesday.

So "Ticagrelor (Brilinta) in this setting, with acute coronary syndrome patients with the capacity need for bypass surgery, is more effective than clopidogrel (Plavix) in preventing cardiovascular and totality mortality without increasing the risk of bleeding". A danger with any anti-platelet medicament is the risk of uncontrolled bleeding, which is why these drugs are stopped before patients undergo surgery.

Held was scheduled to make known the results Tuesday at the American College of Cardiology's annual meeting in Atlanta. For the study, Held and colleagues looked at a subgroup of 1261 patients in the Platelet Inhibition and Patient Outcomes (PLATO) trial. The researchers found that 10,5 percent of the patients given Brilinta supplementary aspirin before surgery had a callousness attack, achievement or died from heart disease within a week after surgery. Among patients given Plavix with an increment of aspirin, 12,6 percent had the same adverse outcomes.

Patients taking Brilinta had a total number death rate of 4,6 percent, compared with 9,2 percent for patients taking Plavix. In addition, the cardiovascular decease rates were 4 percent among patients taking Brilinta and 7,5 percent amidst those taking Plavix. When Held's team looked at each group individually, they found no statistically significant idiosyncrasy for heart attack and stroke and no significant difference in major bleeding from the bypass operation itself. The two drugs employment in different ways.

Plavix needs the body to convert it to an active form, which poses some problems. Last week, the US Food and Drug Administration required Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi Aventis, the makers of Plavix, to join a "black box" caveat to the drug's label, alerting doctors and patients that some patients cannot fully change the drug, so it may be less effective for them. Brilinta, which is in a unusual class of drugs, does not rely on metabolic conversion, so it acts faster and clears the body faster than Plavix. This enables quicker turn for the better of normal platelet function, the researchers say.

But Held can't clear up the difference in the rate of death. "That's the billion dollar question. Right now we don't cotton on the mechanism. We see the difference in mortality, but we cannot illustrate it in differences in bleeding so there has to be some other effect explaining the difference".

The PLATO study was funded by AstraZeneca, the maker of Brilinta. Results of another inquiry presented at the meeting Tuesday found that the drug Tekturna (aliskiren) given to patients after a bravery attack did not improve heart function as researchers had hoped.

In that trial - called the Aliskiren Study in Post-MI Patients to Reduce Remodeling (ASPIRE) - Tekturna, which blocks the hormone renin, was given to patients along with non-private blood pressure-lowering drugs. But the researchers found it provided no additional aid in sentiment function and only served to raise potassium levels and cause low blood pressure.

So "Morbidity and mortality stay put high in patients following heart attack, with a substantial army of patients subsequently developing heart failure," Dr Scott D Solomon, executive of noninvasive cardiology at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School in Boston and be first researcher, said in a statement. "We hoped that this study would generate the information needed to plot a major morbidity and mortality trial.

However, our results show that the addition of aliskiren to standard therapy in high-risk post-MI patients does not assume left ventricular size or function discover more here. These findings suggest the trouble for caution when treating post-heart attack patients".